Once More Into The Fray
by Ted Empty
Summary: In the wake of the Gold Morning, a brand-spanking new cape with an artistic persuasion and nonexistent morals begins to amass a band new cabal of psychopaths, lusting to emulate his heroes...the Slaughterhouse Nine. This is not a long or epic story, but a collection of snips I wrote on SpaceBattles a ways back. I may finish it or do something else with it someday.
1. The Critic

Once More Into The Fray: Part One

The Critic

Milo Larson stood over a dead body.

Dead bodies were nothing special. Lots of people died, all the time. Sometimes other people killed them. Other times they were killed by the monsters. The Golden Man killed more people than anything else ever, really. Almost scrubbed humanity from existence. That was boring. Just a flash and then no more you.

But sometimes, death was an _art form._

Milo Larson knew from art. He had been drawing on the walls of his room since he was a little boy.

Then his notebooks. Then his homework. Then his skin.

He could look at a piece and determine if colors synergized, if meaning was carried, if there was a balance of minimal space and economy of form.

The so called artists of the world would keep dropping their pants and vomiting from their assholes onto the masses absorbent skulls.

There were so few true artists anymore.

Once upon a time there were nine of them. Glorious people, people of legend, who saw the world as their Slaughterhouse and the pigs around them as what they truly were.

The cutting man and his endless wit. Milo watched every video, every threat he made to the unenlightened swine beneath him. He idolized him. He craved the cutting man's everything. He carved his flesh with icons of his desire. He wanted to wear his very _skin. _He was an artist who used the mind as his canvas, painting little pictures in his disciples heads with the blood of the unworthy.

The empty man and his...his glorious woman. The feral and free one that had torn that _**BITCH'S EYE OUT.**_

He lusted after every inch of her naked, perfect form. Her art was beautiful and straightforward, a punch in the teeth that left you reeling and horny.

But of them, the one that remained was the prodigy. Such a gifted little girl, she was. The art she created...by god...it was the most beautiful thing Milo had ever seen in his life. He wanted to kiss the ground she had walked on. Taking frail, filthy little things and carving them and cutting them and sewing them into new angels and demons and elightened beings-

Milo found himself sweating again. The corpse beneath him softly bled, leaking the crimson paints with which he wrote his messages. This would be a gorgeous mural, truly it would be.

Damn. A thousand damnations. Curse the shit frothing forth from the oozing pustules on the dick of his mother in HELL.

Milo didn't know what to paint. The artist, the Critic, he knew not what images to draw forth.

But then Milo thought about his idols. He thought about the gift he had oh-so-recently been given. Milo's perceptions had been honed and accentuated after the Morning. After he saw the devastation and the creaking of a strained and broken world he could see where things were weak. He could find the darkest, most vulnerable place in you and take it and rape it with his words. He wondered if someday, he could make art like the masters of old.

Milo thought on what he must do. He dipped his hand into the crimson leaking from the streetwalker's skull after he buried his knife in her temple.

He reached onto the white-on-brick wall and wrote one little numeral. One little thing that would make the Critic into the next great hero amongst those who knew.

Milo reached onto the wall and painted a 9.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.


	2. The Artist

Once More Into The Fray: Part Two

The Artist

Deep in a concrete box run by the Wardens of the World, a little girl's eyes snapped open.

Bad dream, just a bad dream. She had put The Family behind her, convinced herself and everyone else that they were bad and wrong and she would never forgive herself.

But deep, wriggling and writhing in the bone child's mind...

She missed falling asleep in the mad woman's arms, smelling soot and blood and freedom.

And that scared her.

Riley closed her eyes again and slowly lowered her head back onto her pillow.

They were gone. They were all gone.

Well, Vasil was somewhere out in the briny blue. The Bitch. Until someone got it in their heads to get her out of there or put her in the ground for good, she'd keep on making the fish off themselves.

And that one guy, Harbinger, he was still running around. What a nerd. One of the last truly living members of the Nine, and he wore a pocket protector?

And Jack. Mister Jack. The monster. The man that ended everything, by telling the Worm to butcher the world.

Jack had made one last cutting remark in the end, even after getting...hehe...Nicked himself.

His end would never come. He would loop and dance forever in ceaseless agony, until someone figured out how to put the Gray Brat's victims out of their misery. Riley thought both of the man who took her's endless pain and the endless dancing of the man she took. Heh, well, a little part of her still thought that was funny. It kind of bugged her.

Riley wanted to smile and frown.

Now what would happen?

The Endbringers have been sitting like lemons since the Morning. Since...Khepri.

The world was stitching back together, ever so slowly. Riley had made hit her personal mission to undo as many of the wrongs she had committed as she could, and still people were sedated before she treated them so they wouldn't try to gouge her eyes out.

She had good company from time to time. Psycho Tuesdays were always a good time, where she'd have a snack with Cici and Rinke. Those two were whacked out, even by her standards.

The world was healing, and it was one that had been cut too many times already. This was a world that needed to be fixed with time.

There wasn't any need for a Bonesaw anymore.

_" Be a good girl."_

And she would be. Never again would she let monsters butcher the innocent for pleasure and joy as she and her Family had done. Nobody would ever step foot in the Slaughterhouse again.

Which is why Riley was about to have a very, very uncomfortable morning.


	3. Numerals

Once More Into The Fray: Part Two

Numerals

In the amassed crowd of people, rubbernecking at the scene behind yellow tape, a man frowned.

Sighing and pushing up his glasses, the Number Man turned to keep on his merry way. He was to be meeting with a former client, a young miss who thought she could think the thoughts of judge, jury, and excecutioner.

However, he had been stopped on his walk by an ugly sight. The corpse of a whore, put on display by someone who simply did not seem to think at all. And then the number, smattered in scarlet.

As his name so aptly described, the Number Man saw the world as an interlocking matrix, all things just dressed up variations of the only things that count.

He dwelled on the ennead's numeral, the one painted on this wall behind him.

A composite number, the third square. Highest single digit of the decimal system. An exponential factorial, the only square prime with an aliquot sum of the same form.

There were nine of lots of things. Nine millimeters of caliber in a common handgun's bullet. Nine Muses, Nine Worthies, Nine Unknown Men.

Nine Circles of Hell.

As he walked, he breathed in through his nose, smelling the broken city and hearing it sing.

He also smelled death, a familiar scent.

Those old days were so strange to him now, before he found himself at the heart of conspiracy with the Doctor and her Contessa and all the creatures in their mysterious realm.

He thought of Jack, who proved how painful long division can be.

And of the Grey Boy, who only knew of numbers repeating.

And then of the King, who found himself sitting on a throne of failure and entrails.

What kind of fool would bring back that age in such a brutish way? The Number Man had determined from the angle of the knife's placement and his mental reconstruction of the scene that the assailant had precision. A Thinker's precision.

He would have to watch his step. If he found himself in a position of apparent violation regarding the "truce" that seemed to be governing the major players, well, what could stop Valkyrie from acquiring a devastatingly intelligent new specter?

A sigh.

The Number Man adjusted his tie, ever so slightly. He wore a clean, pressed, tailored suit, as was what was customary on a formal visitation.

He smiled, as if thinking of a small joke.

Here he was, dressed to the nines.


End file.
